3 ms·

I sometimes think that many of the B2B type products are actually best developed as open source solutions. The company in the example could probably have had m

by jiggy2011 14y ago

I sometimes think that many of the B2B type products are actually best developed as open source solutions. The company in the example could probably have had massive cost savings and greater efficiency by simply switching this system out for any one of the open source CMSs and hiring a few people experienced in developing on those platforms. Of course I appreciate that such things are not so easy in practice. Common business requirements are often exactly the sorts of things that are economical to develop as open source. For example over my business career I have developed all kinds of mini frameworks , jquery plugins etc for businesses where these is really little reason (i.e competitive advantage to the company) for not making these things open source. A big hurdle in selling to business is also "what happens if the three man team behind this product get hit by a bus, go bankrupt etc". An active open source project or a product from a large vendor like Microsoft gives them peace of mind.

codeka 14y ago
I once worked for an enterprise-y software development company. They had an enterprise-y source code control solution. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but just checking out the latest code took literally an hour. It was so bad that people who were working together would have one person check out the code, then create a temporary git repository over it, and everybody would branch off that. When they'd finished working, they'd merge all their changes together into one ginormous commit into the "main" SCC. Actually dealing with merge conflicts and building the software was outsourced, so nobody cared that these enormous commits (usually made months after the initial checkout) took dozens of hours to resolve. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever witnessed.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Some of the big ticket tracking solutions are even worse. For example in the past I have used stuff from "Peregrine systems" (now owned by HP) that was so bad that actual ticket tracking was done via shared .xls files and we dedicated a team member each day to putting the data into Peregrine. That VCS system sounds a lot like just plain CVS (though perhaps under a different name), I remember checkouts under CVS taking an age.

codeka 14y ago

I once worked for an enterprise-y software development company. They had an enterprise-y source code control solution. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but just checking out the latest code took literally an hour. It was so bad that people who were working together would have one person check out the code, then create a temporary git repository over it, and everybody would branch off that. When they'd finished working, they'd merge all their changes together into one ginormous commit into the "main" SCC. Actually dealing with merge conflicts and building the software was outsourced, so nobody cared that these enormous commits (usually made months after the initial checkout) took dozens of hours to resolve. It was the most bizarre thing I've ever witnessed.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Some of the big ticket tracking solutions are even worse. For example in the past I have used stuff from "Peregrine systems" (now owned by HP) that was so bad that actual ticket tracking was done via shared .xls files and we dedicated a team member each day to putting the data into Peregrine. That VCS system sounds a lot like just plain CVS (though perhaps under a different name), I remember checkouts under CVS taking an age.